Posted
by
msmash
on Friday April 21, 2017 @10:41AM
from the school-needs-goddamn-internet dept.

The FCC voted on Thursday to approve a controversial plan to deregulate the $45 billion market for business-to-business broadband, also known as Business Data Services (BDS), by eliminating price caps that make internet access more affordable for thousands of small businesses, schools, libraries and hospitals. The Outline adds: The price caps were designed to keep phone and, later, broadband, access cheap for community institutions like schools, hospitals, libraries, and small businesses. Now, there will be no limit. A spokesperson for the trade association Incompas, which advocates for competition among communications providers, told The Outline that the increase is expected to be at least 25 percent across the board. Low-income schools already don't have enough money; according to a report last year in The Atlantic, schools in high-poverty districts, where the property taxes are lower, spend 15.6 percent less per student than schools in low-poverty districts. If internet costs go up by 25 percent, it may make more sense to cut that budget item, or, for schools that still don't have internet, never add it at all. Add it to the list of things that well-funded schools in already-rich neighborhoods get that schools in low-income neighborhoods don't. New textbooks. Gyms. Advanced Placement classes that let students earn college credits. Computers. Internet access.

President Trump is right to reevaluate, and clean up where necessary, regulation that has caused disruptions to economic markets.

It's well known at this point that price caps cause market distortions, which directly lead to a non-optimal allocation of resources.

When I hear about things like "high-poverty districts", these are usually formed because of price caps (on the price of rent) or some other market-distorting regulation that has prevented the investment that would otherwise take place from taking place in these areas.

Let's take rent control as a simple example. Imposing these distortions removes the incentive for landlords to maintain and improve their properties. When this happens, the wealthier people eventually move away to better properties, leaving only the impoverished who can't move. They often can't, or don't, pay rent, which again hurts the landlords. The landlords who do remain will become slumlords. Others will just abandon their properties, or worse, destroy them to collect at least some insurance reimbursement. The end result is that "high-poverty districts" form, and stay like that until the economic distortion that caused them to be formed is removed.

Another example is minimum wage floors. These make it prohibitive for businesses to start, and make it harder for existing businesses to continue remaining viable. These also help create "high-poverty districts", because there are fewer jobs than there naturally would be if labor didn't need to be paid artificially high wages.

Given how we universally see price caps and wage floors causing severe and disruptive economic distortions everywhere else, there's no reason to expect broadband Internet to be any different. Price caps there are no doubt leading to all sorts of market inefficiencies, and these can't be cleared up overnight. The pain being felt in the short term would be thanks to imposing these caps in the first place, and causing the economic distortions that now have to be undone.

Let's take rent control as a simple example. Imposing these distortions removes the incentive for landlords to maintain and improve their properties. When this happens, the wealthier people eventually move away to better properties, leaving only the impoverished who can't move. They often can't, or don't, pay rent, which again hurts the landlords. The landlords who do remain will become slumlords. Others will just abandon their properties, or worse, destroy them to collect at least some insurance reimbursement. The end result is that "high-poverty districts" form, and stay like that until the economic distortion that caused them to be formed is removed.

However, your example does not apply to the issue because it is too broad with lots of competitors. Most areas in the U.S. only have ONE broad band provider in each area. Then the provider would do whatever it can to get itself to be the ONLY one in the area; thus, there is NO competition. Allowing no price cap in this case actually opens a can of worm. The no-limit cap could work if and only if there is a competition.

However, your example does not apply to the issue because it is too broad with lots of competitors. Most areas in the U.S. only have ONE broad band provider in each area. Then the provider would do whatever it can to get itself to be the ONLY one in the area; thus, there is NO competition. Allowing no price cap in this case actually opens a can of worm. The no-limit cap could work if and only if there is a competition.

It seems to me that the imposition of price caps acts as a barrier to new competitors. It's just another form of rent control. With the pricing cap gone, prices would almost certainly rise in the short term, and this would lure new providers into the marketplace. This is exactly what happened to American oil producers when world oil prices rose sharply a couple years ago.

New providers?! You've certainly haven't paid attention to all of those laws that ISP lobbyists have been working for in local government to stifle any new competition. They've done their best to block newcomers and have sliced up the pie enough to stay out of each others way. Now instead of growth, they just increase their current prices. This has been their plan for the past few decades.
If you think more of the same will change things then you really need to educate yourself.

Except Internet distribution is far closer to water or power distribution... it needs physical access to every home, use of public right of ways, and society is best serviced when there are not multiple sets of identical infrastructures competing. This is why we standardized train track sizes, roads sizes, etc. to force one set of universally usable infrastructure. In places where there is one set of infrastructure we either fund it with taxes or regulate the monopoly which maintains it.

You know... you make a coherent enough argument that I don't actually think you're trolling. Unfortunately, it's a weak argument.

Let's take rent control as a simple example. Imposing these distortions removes the incentive for landlords to maintain and improve their properties. When this happens, the wealthier people eventually move away to better properties, leaving only the impoverished who can't move.

That's half of the problem, but what about the alternative? If rent prices rise, the impoverished still can't move to more affordable places (who also would be removing rent control, and thus becoming less affordable every year). Instead, they get evicted and become homeless, in the process usually losing most investments (furniture, clothes, and other personal items) they've managed to accumulate. Once homeless, they are extremely vulnerable, and crime against the homeless typically runs rampant. The end result is that your low-income community has turned into a high-rent development that looks shiny, but sits vacant because of the crime and housing problem... and in turn, the landlords still don't get paid.

Another example is minimum wage floors. These make it prohibitive for businesses to start, and make it harder for existing businesses to continue remaining viable.

What makes starting a business such a special event that it requires employees to live in poverty? If your business model is so bad and your business so unsuccessful that you have to underpay your workforce, perhaps you shouldn't be starting a business. I know it's the Great American Dream to own a business, but perhaps we should ensure nobody else gets screwed over in the process?

What makes starting a business such a special event that it requires employees to live in poverty? If your business model is so bad and your business so unsuccessful that you have to underpay your workforce, perhaps you shouldn't be starting a business. I know it's the Great American Dream to own a business, but perhaps we should ensure nobody else gets screwed over in the process?

Please define "underpay." A worker is worth less than the value he or she creates, period. If the work a person does only generates $5.00 an hour in value, are you making the case that the worker should be paid more anyway? How long do expect that employer to continue employing that worker when the revenue generated doesn't cover said employee's cost? Is it okay to "screw over" the employer by making that person pay more to the employee than he/she generates in profit?

On the flip side, if you remove minimum wage, what's to stop an employer from paying nearly nothing for work that generates the employer more money? If an employee generates $25 an hour in value and the employer pays $0.50 an hour, what would protect the worker? Before you say "they can just change jobs", recognize that you could have an industry "race to the bottom" with salaries. The ones that pay less might make more profits and can gobble up (or force out of business) the ones that pay more.

To give an example, my son recently went to a local museum where he learned about the NYC garment district around the early 1900's. There was no minimum wage or safety regulations so people were worked 15 hours (6am - 9pm) for $3 a week. (That's about $1 an hour in today's money.) If people didn't want to work those hours or asked for more money, they were fired and people who would accept the hours/pay were hired. Every employer in the area paid about the same, so you couldn't just go to another employer. (The lack of safety regulations caused a fire [wikipedia.org] that killed 146 workers.)

Minimum wage laws can help to keep employers from forcing workers to work long hours for little to no pay. They can help keep employees from falling below the poverty line or from having to work three jobs just to make ends meet. They might not be perfect, but doing away with the minimum wage entirely would be disastrous.

That was one of the reasons that Americans hated fresh off the boat immigrants in the early 1900s (Irish need not apply and all the rest). Americans knew (unlike most people today) that fresh immigrants would work for less and drive down wages and were also creating a glut in the labor market. From your example, employers can only "race to the bottom" when there is a glut in labor force. If paying too low a wage or working too long hours causes you to lose employees that you cannot find replacements for,

Let's go with a nice capitalist version: A worker is underpaid when his or her regular expenses are higher than what they make in net income during the same average period. Note that the definition isn't a particular dollar amount, but rather depends heavily on one's expenses, which in turn are defined mostly by societal and local norms. An intended side effect of this definition is that someone with high expenses can still be underpaid if those expenses aren't covered.

Let's go with a nice capitalist version: A worker is underpaid when his or her regular expenses are higher than what they make in net income during the same average period.

This could not be farther from "capitalist." As a business owner I could not possibly care less how much your life decisions cost you. My only concern is whether the cost of employing a person is justified by the value they will provide, either now or eventually.

A worker is a human life whose value is independent of what they are able to produce, period.

Is it not obvious I am talking about a worker's output and not their value as a human being?

If the worker's output is not profitable for the company, the business should raise its prices so it can be profitable while still supporting its workers for their time. If the market does not support such prices, the business model should not be considered viable.

No. Please take note of all the restaurants in California that have closed in the last few months that found out what happened when they tried to raise price

As a business owner I could not possibly care less how much your life decisions cost you. My only concern is whether the cost of employing a person is justified by the value they will provide, either now or eventually.

I'm not saying that as a business owner you should do otherwise. I am, however, suggesting that if your business model doesn't support everyone involved, it would be reasonable for such a grossly exploitative business plan to be forbidden by law. I'm a capitalist, not a libertarian.

Is it not obvious I am talking about a worker's output and not their value as a human being?

No, it is not obvious, and in discussions about minimum wage laws, it rarely is.

Please take note of all the restaurants in California that have closed in the last few months that found out what happened when they tried to raise prices to accommodate the increased minimum wage.

Perhaps, then, their business was not actually sustainable, and it's right for them to close. Why is a business closing such a horrible thing, but an

"The end result is that your low-income community has turned into a high-rent development that looks shiny, but sits vacant because of the crime and housing problem... and in turn, the landlords still don't get paid."

Midtown Miami summed up perfectly. Want to see this in action, go there.

See that's all fine and logical when you phrase it that way. But it completely forgets to ask the question: If these "high-poverty" districts didn't exist, where would the people who live in them be? These people don't just disappear because you don't happen to like thinking about them.

You're arguing that rent should be free to jump through the roof and then in the next paragraph state that employers should be free to pay whatever wages they want -- which is pretty much always going to be far below the p

Trump is not paying one bit of attention to the FCC. Pai is an out control representative of Verizon, not voters. The question is, will Pai's utter corruption have consequences at the polls causing Trump/Congress to start paying attention?

The other part of this -- rate relief is generally provided when the vendors are unable to make a profit. Most of the B2B lines already carry profit margins exceeding 90%. This is just simple corruption - remove the price caps so that monopoly vendors can gouge until the c

The price controls are for the benefit of the utilities, not for the benefit of their customers.

They are part of the scheme where their buddies in the government prevent anyone from competing with them and ensure they have steady profits and don't have to worry too much about expenses (including lobbying money).

Holy Shit! You have choices?! I have Charter and uhhh every now and then ATT sends me a letter saying i may qualify for dsl or u-verse only to say Oops, our bad, when i call about it. I guess i can get 10GB/month on Satellite or maybe dial up services if those count?

I've had someone try to tell me that DSL, satellite, and wireless services count as competition for wired Broadband. I currently have Spectrum (Charter, formally Time Warner Cable) at $35 a month - though that's a TWC rate that will likely go away next year and my cost will increase to around $60 a month.

DSL in my area is about 4Mbps for around $40 a month on lines that Verizon wants to get rid of ASAP. Satellite has slow speeds, low caps, and high cost. As for wireless, I use about 500GB a month - mostly

To be fair, my current connection is 15Mbps so it's not broadband either. When Spectrum forces me to their plan, I'm supposed to get a speed bump that might take me above broadband levels. When Time Warner Cable was here, they offered actual broadband, but you had to pay a lot more for it. Again, monopoly position = the company will charge you whatever it likes for whatever service is decides to provide and you can take it or go without.

I have the same exact setup. Comcast, crap DSL, or even worse satellite.

I dumped my residential service and picked up business class internet at 50/10 for just over $100 a month due to, at the time, a pending monthly cap implementation. Disgusted at the terrible upload speed as I regularly have to upload 10-12 gig image files to coworkers.

When I asked about symmetrical speeds, I was told that yes Comcast does offer a fiber solution, which does fit the bill. However, it would cost me about $700 a month.

The thing is, I'd be all for "let the markets fix it" if the ISP market actually had competition. If I could choose between 12 different comparable ISPs, I could easily vote with my wallet. When I only have one option, though, voting with my wallet doesn't work. The ISP market is broken and this means "let the markets fix it" won't do anything. Government regulations might not fix the market, but they can stem abuses in the short term and possibly even lay the groundwork for competition to sprout up in the longer term.

Most service locations in the US has one actual broadband option, usually with a shitty DSL option as 'competition'. Only in rare circumstances are there several multi-megabit services available to choose from.

Here in Oregon, more specifically the greater Portland Metropolitan area, we actually have quite a few choices. There's even a local fiber company called Fibersphere that if you are lucky enough to be in their service area, offers 100Mbs at $40/mo, or 1Gbs at $80/mo, up and down. Currently I live in a building 4 years old that doesn't have their service, and I pay for Comcast at the introductionary rate of $50/mo for 200Mbps down and 12Mbps up. Kitty corner from us is a building which is 1 years old and

Trump is very consistent and clear in whom he serves and it's not the working class. Once again, making money for his friends at the expense of us all. Wonder what's next in his mad run to basically allow infinite inflation of essential services. (And yes, the Internet is basically an essential service, like electricity: you can "live" without it, but getting what we consider essential services because a challenge without it)

It never ceases to amaze me how Republicans can convince people to vote against their own best interests. At this point I'm inclined to say fuck it. The only way they'll learn is to let this run its course. Cut the internet access at schools and let the poor people experience offline life, then casually point out why it is like it is.

Is it objectively in inner-city blacks' "best interests" to keep voting Democrat and remain mired in poverty for generation after generation?

Do you really think ideology is the solution to everyone's problem? Do you believe your enemy's ideology is itself the cause of everyone's suffering?

While we're sitting here arguing about liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans are either ignoring us or outright raping us. They give us the minimum amount of attention, then they directly target us with punitive laws and regulations for their own personal enrichment.

Going more extreme, and demanding a unified front of all Republicans or all Demo

this is all true, but I'm hoping these issues are no longer party affiliate, but national issues with a united front regardless of party. the Republicans are fragment so you cannot say all Republicans are equal (not that you ever could...but it's painfully clear now). By that definition, I wonder if the Republican party is truly a party anymore (or basically a set of factions to the point they are really separate entities). Voting all one or all the other won't fix anything. Its fixing people's priorities a

At least it will be a little entertaining to see how Trumpers justify more expensive, slower internet in a few years. Will they insist it's the greatest internet service ever?Will they say it's good because people should be getting their news from radio and cable news instead? Will they say nothing because there's only a glowing ash pile where this dumb fucking country used to be?

You're funny if you think Trump is working for middle America and not his rich buddies. Who do you think goes to Trump hotels, golf courses and country clubs? He's made tons of money servicing the rich. Why do do you think that would change when he became President? Because when it really comes down to it, it's the "haves" vs. the "have-nots" in this world.
You see a man who promised to "drain the swamp" of corrupt politicians. I see a man taking out those corrupt politicians and replacing them with member

Uh, how about calling for police, medical or fire department services in emergencies? How about relaying critical information in a crisis where speed is crucial? Humor aside, I fail to see how the ability and popularity of essential tool for non-essential purposes makes the service itself non-essential. For example, are scalpels unessential for because more people use them more often for cosmetic surgery than for life saving operations? You don't invalidate the life saving operations by doing cosmetic surge

In our area, the broadband providers are required to provide internet access to schools (both public and private) and libraries for FREE as part of the agreements with the municipality. Sounds like the other municipalities need to do a better job of negotiating.

The information I was more skeptical about was that there are still schools in the US without internet access. I could have understood that 20 years ago, but now? I know that in my state, at least, there are whole sections of state-mandated curricula that require the internet to teach. Do these school districts not do things like digitize attendance records...?

Most schools give lip service to spending money on reducing class sizes and getting Internet access. But when it comes to replacing the football field, the money can always be found for new football fields. When my parents retired to Sacramento in the mid-1990's, my father drove me around the county. He pointed out all the schools that didn't have money to reduce class sizes (the Internet was still "new" back then) but had the money to build a new football field. If one school was replacing their football field, all the schools had to replace their football field. Can't have schools lagging in important priorities.

Uhh...this is known as an INFORMATION age for a reason. The best expanding jobs are in the information technology field. Plus information sharing and collaboration are primarily done through the Internet. So Broadband is an essential part of that. Saying that people can always find money from somewhere is not a reason for making it harder to get something that is essential for people need to know how to use to be successful (or even has a basic middle class living) or even get basic services we consider ess

Uhh...this is known as an INFORMATION age for a reason. The best expanding jobs are in the information technology field. Plus information sharing and collaboration are primarily done through the Internet.

I heard that sales pitch back in the early 1980's when Apple ][ came into the middle school I attended. That's when I found out I came from a "poor" family because we couldn't afford a $2,500 Apple ][ (computer, two floppy drives and monochrome monitor). The funny thing is that not owning an Apple ][ didn't prevent me from pursuing a technology career.

Saying that people can always find money from somewhere [...]

Football existed before the INFORMATION age. Given a choice between a new computer lab and a new football field, most communities will want a new football fie

In Texas, you'll never pass a vote to issue a $2m bond to build a new school. If the bond is for a new $20m football stadium, it'll pass with 85% of the vote.
Most places it isn't a school priority to build a football stadium, it's a community priority. The school isn't spending any of the money they have for educating (or educational facilities) to build a stadium. Yes, it is completely wrong, but you can't really blame the school budget.

That's not the point. If you can make an investment of $1 million today that will bring in $300k of "profit" every year for the next 15 years, do you make that investment? What if that "profit" covers all the costs for every athletic program at the school and puts some money into the yearly budget?

As far as the prices go I still want to know why the local schools are still using bonded T1 lines instead of the local fiber ISP

Best I can figure the e-rate subsidy makes them really really cheap as you can get a 50/50 buisness class fiber connection in town here for $157 Sure that's not cheap but you can't get a single T1 line for that price anywhere.

Couple of things here:- If its just a field, that's (relatively) cheap. Bunch of bleachers, some flood lighting, some grass and other such odds and ends. As long as they've got the land, that's not too expensive -- even if its $100k, that's only 2-3 years worth of a single teacher's salary (no idea what Comcast charges a school for internet or whatever so can't make that comparison.)Now if we're talking full on stadiums, that's a whole other story. Those suckers get into the 10s or even 100s of millions

One of the new usage for the new facility is to rent it out on weekend to generate revenue.

A new library and community center got built in a big building near my home. I was looking forward to the new library. On grand opening day, I discovered that the library was quite small. The rest of the space was for a full-size gym, basketball court and meeting rooms that the city could rent out to community groups. I never go to that library even though its the closest one to my home.

Verizon/Comcast: What if we keep the old price and Abraham Lincoln High becomes Abraham Lincoln High (sponsored by Verizon/Comcast)? And the gym is now called the Verizon/Comcast Center. And if you could include our company in your math problems, that would be great.

The property business was getting too complex. So now it's clearer to invest in properties where the good neighborhood will mean prospective owners will care that their children have internet access on their school.

As a technology director for a public K-12 school, I'm very concerned about what I'm reading in the headline. But the "article" is an extremely biased report, citing just as equally biased an article [vice.com], and neither article really gives me a clue as to what's going on here.

So, let's start at the source: Here is the actual FCC draft order specific to this change [fcc.gov]. Now, in the course of working on and completing E-Rate [wikipedia.org] filings with the USAC [usac.org] to receive reimbursement for internet and network services for our school district, I've read a few 60-70 page FCC reports before. They're not fun, but they're necessary. That being said, I'm about 20 pages in, and already I'm disturbed. Here's why:

FCC reports that I've read in the past are boring, dry reads, but at least they're factual and unbiased. Not so with this one. Three sentences in, and we get this: "The FCC has historically subjected the provision of business data services by incumbent local exchange carriers (LECs) to price regulations." And the spin continues..."eases the regulatory burdens"; "spur entry, innovation and competition in the vibrant business data services market"; "competition is robust and vigorous in the markets." And this is still just the first page. The draft order is littered with biased political spin, something that has not been present in my reading of previous FCC draft orders. Because of this, I can't even depend on a government document to give me an unbiased report of the rationale behind the decision, nor can I depend on it to help me determine what the consequences of the decision will be. So, I'll have to create my own... here goes.

Local Exchange Carrier (LEC) price regulations have been there historically specifically to protect subscribers from LECs that had monopoly or near-monopoly controls over their service regions. Most regions throughout the United States historically were not served by competitive broadband providers. Recently, this has begun to change, where some communities now have competitive service providers come in, giving subscribers a choice. The FCC began to look into this issue back in 2012, before Trump. According to the report, "In December 2012, the Commission released the Data Collection Order FNPRM, to collect data, analyze how competition, “whether actual or potential, affects prices, controlling for all other factors that affect prices,” and “determine what barriers inhibit investment and delay competition, including regulatory barriers." By not controlling pricing, the FCC claims in its report that LECs will no longer be limited entry into a potential market, where capped rates would not allow for a sufficient recovery of the investment necessary to build into a new market area.

But, here's the flaw in their reasoning: trenching fiber costs a lot of money. A lot. If service provider A already has fiber, service provider B is not going to install fiber if it does not believe that it can earn back their investment in a reasonable amount of time. Even if prices are artificially inflated by provider A, just because they can, if provider B tries to compete and trenches their own fiber network, both A and B know that A can lower its rates to a competitive level to drive out provider B. So, B has no incentive to trench, leaving A with the monopoly.

The easiest solution: make internet a utility. It's silly to think that it's a smart idea to run multiple fiber lines to a building. (I should know; our school has two of them, and both are dark.) It would be just as silly to have multiple electric taps, or multiple water pipes. But, that's not happening anytime

Installing fiber isn't that expensive. I live in a semi-rural area several miles outside of the nearest small town, and 25 miles from the nearest big town, ~50 miles from a city, and ~100 miles from a major metro area. And I have three fiber pedestals near my house, from two different cable companies.

If you don't have two cable plants in your area you either have a political problem, or an opportunity.

The city near me has a political problem. The cable company I get my fiber connection from has their pla

Installing fiber isn't that expensive. I live in a semi-rural area several miles outside of the nearest small town, and 25 miles from the nearest big town, ~50 miles from a city, and ~100 miles from a major metro area. And I have three fiber pedestals near my house, from two different cable companies.

Nice anecdote. By the way, have you ever trenched fiber for a local telecom? It's not cheap. Two minutes of Google searching gave me this neat data [dot.gov]. A couple installs in Florida ran about $10,000 per mile back in 2013. Let's use that as a base cost. Wikipedia then tells me that Google needed 4,000 miles of fiber to setup in San Antonio [wikipedia.org]. So, $40 million dollars, just for one city. And if there already was one or two other providers there offering services, able to price-cut their services to maintain their subscriber base, that would give me even less reason to start breaking ground.

I've spoken with two different telecoms about their fiber install over the last five years. Both of them say that there's a substantial initial investment, just to develop a core community of subscribers, which then provides the profits necessary to branch out into neighboring territories, especially in rural areas. (Both teleco's said that rural areas don't turn a profit. The urban areas subsidize the costs.)

I'm just going to point out that the public schools in poor districts who supposedly "never got Internet yet" OR are supposedly in real need of reduced cost Internet broadband because they can't afford to pay the "going rate" for it are, indeed, PUBLIC schools.

When you hear about our failing school systems and those pushing to allow tax dollars to fund sending their kids to private alternatives via a voucher system of some sort -- this is a good example of why. Any government run public school that's so bad off, it still hasn't even obtained Internet access is a FAILURE. It doesn't need subsidized broadband to fix it. It need to be completely gutted and overhauled! Tax dollars pay for everything it does already. If that's not sufficient to pay its bills for things like its Internet connection, then it's not really viable.

...then we should pay for it through publicly raised taxes and published budgets. Then at least it's visible and transparent.

Subsidizing schools by setting price ceilings only obscures the issue and transfers the cost on the ISP's shareholders, employees, and other customers. I don't see why any of them should pay extra to support schools.

Others have commented about shrinking school budgets. We're paying something north of 2.5x as much per student today versus 1970 (adjusted for inflation, e.g. here [cato.org]). I don

Actually.. the markets work when there is sufficient competition to drive down costs... But basically as we continue to consolidate... (in most cases, there is only ONE provider of service in a given area), there is ZERO competition (or zero meaningful competition). And in today's tech landscape, its not like internet is a "toy" that can be easily dismissed unlike say "cable TV" in which there are over the air options (for now). Basically the landscape is coming back to the old "ma bell" days of "this is the price, and suck it because where else will you go"?

So because government regulations have distorted the market, we need to have yet another layer of government regulations to keep the market from being distorted? It's regulatory turtles all the way down.

Price caps = reduction in supply. It doesn't make a lot of sense to say because supply has been reduced, we need price caps. If anything, the economics argues for precisely the opposite. How do you expect competition to exist if there are price caps? With price caps, you're basically legislating reduced supp

I voted for him. I got what I wanted too. I got a SC Justice appointed, maybe one or two more on the way, and Hillary Clinton isn't appointing any of those. I have to admit that I thought we'd have sent Trump packing for Pence by now but otherwise I'm great with it. This is hilarious and I'm starting to think that I hope this show gets renewed for another 4 seasons.
Funniest 91 days on TV I can remember in a long time.

Example (I can't speak for all schools).. but in NY, a medium sized HS pays approx. 210K annually for Internet access and support. (based on today's rates.. that number should be, based on market rate, closer to 300-350K). (smaller schools will pay less (depending on region and bandwidth), and larger schools pay more.).

210,000 x 25% = 262,500 (or 52K more).. Now in the grand scheme of things... that may not SOUND like a lot, but 52K on a small (and increasingly smaller) budget means schools have some very hard choices.. (drop it in favour of other programs which may make it less effective for today's student, etc...). And keep in mind, with no cap, prices CAN go as high as they want (of course there is a point of you "kill the host").. but making them bleed to death is not going to benefit anyone either (but remember, they don't like public schools.. so none of this is really surprising)..

Put in charge of education, someone that wants to see public education gone.Deprive it of federal fundsUse the FCC to remove pricing caps which allow for more expense (notice, available funds have gone down).Use the decline in quality as "proof" of why public schools should be abandoned..Rinse and repeat until the problem goes away on its own.. or parents (en mass) vote to eliminate it.

To be accurate, the cost increase is for Special Access Lines. This just covers the transport portion of the cost, and it's only for areas that aren't already served by existing infrastructure.

As an example, if you're in an area that there is no form of existing infrastructure to reach your site at the desired data rate, like some place remote enough that existing copper won't support even T1s, then the telco is allowed to charge it as a special access line. If the service is already in the region, nope,

- A "medium sized" high school may be 2000 students, 100ish staff. So that's 2100 people accessing a network. A 2100 person business isn't going to have one 20 mbps line. Heck, nowadays a 20 mbps line can be barely adequate for family use -- one HD youtube stream can consume 4.5 mbps alone. You are going to bring that to its knees if you have 2100 people sharing it.- Students access web sites like wikipedia, news sites and other curriculum related sites. These are b

Uh... all the kids aren't on all at the same time. Most schools have about 4 laptops per classroom, with maybe 4 carts you can reserve for the whole class... so say classes of 20 that's 100 classes (which honestly is a HUGE school) which is ~560 online at once... max. The real issues are that a lot of classrooms utilize *video* now... places like youtube, PBS, TED, netflix etc are great resources for teachers.... and that video eats up a ton of bandwidth.

My daugher's school uses iPads for pretty much every subject. Twentyish kids in each class, 1000 in the school building (2 grades). Each kid has an iPad and it's connected to wifi when the kids are in class. Town has a population of 35K. The iPads are on all the time and used all day for every lesson. Our high school has about 2000 kids with iPads. Plus desktop computers and laptops used by the staff. We are not a wealthy district, either. We aren't dirt poor but we are not even top ten in the state for thi

We'll have to check back in a few months and see if the prices actually rise or not...but those price caps were put in place for a reason and I doubt much has changed in terms of ISP competition since they were, so I know where I'm placing my bets.

So.. this "balanced" article is claiming that removing price caps won't result in price increases because.. competition? If that was really the case then why would they care about the price caps in the first place -- they should already be well under them if competition was the driving force.

Never mind the fact that we're talking about one of the least competitive markets in the country. Sure critics "subdivide" the market -- based on the service areas defined by where those companies serve. Its not comp